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Opulence defined.

ORDINARY CITIZEN'S NOTES. 2 JAN 2015. FRI. N3.Opulence defined.

I CHECKED THE GMA News and anything not worthy of seeing is this excessive production of visual images on what is being touted--it is not yet done and over with, this media hype--of the royal wedding between one Ding and another Marian.

You try checking that site, and you realize that even this supposedly more intellectual GMA 7 has gone less visceral what with its deployment of this opulence of that wedding, the opulence, as in all kinds of opulence, in the wrong place and time.

A wedding gown at 3 million pesos which is the equivalent of 10 years of labor at the SM Malls of 30 salesladies for a year!

A wedding cake of 7 million pesos which is equivalent to 10 years of labor of 35 salesmen at Robinson's Galleria.

And that 'yabang' big bike--what is its name again so he can prove he is the knight in shining armor, this Dingdong guy making dingdong of these opulent images of excess?--that brings him to the Immaculate Conception Church where there, with the blessings of a number of bishops and priests, these two will live happily ever after.

GMA 7 calculated all these moves.

It is a wedding produced by this TV station, and the intent is clear: for these images and the story behind them to be sold to the public hungry for images they will never have, images they never be part of, images that remain part of the fantastic in their politically and aesthetically-challenged heads.

We now must be big in context. Failing to be big in context means that we will only end up as consumers of all these things, and thus, rendering us mindless and morons, mutatis mutandis.

Now, let us see this context I got from another site, Tangina This.

Let us see.

And let us weep even as we remember the Zambo siege and the Zambo people living in tents, and the Eastern Visayas people still trying to makes sense of their Yolanda-ized lives.